Comal will seek a recount over election oddities

Updated 11:41 pm, Friday, November 8, 2013

Comal County wants to recount Tuesday's ballots by hand to resolve problems with both the initial election results from electronic voting machines and the revised tallies those machines produced Wednesday.

The revised numbers didn't change the outcome of any race. Confidence in them, though, plummeted this week because they indicate 649 ballots were cast in the contest for Place 3 on the Schertz City Council, despite only 540 voters being registered in the part of the town that's in Comal County, officials said.

County Judge Sherman Krause conferred with the machine vendor, Election Systems & Software, and the secretary of state's office. The balloting included three at-large council races in Schertz, a Comal Independent School District bond election and a contested seat on the Cibolo Municipal Authority board.

An audit of all 179 voting machines Wednesday showed 16,101 votes were cast countywide, not the 13,686 reported Tuesday night.

Initial results from Tuesday in the Schertz races indicated no candidate had received more than 22 votes. The new tally showed 103 and 93 total ballots cast in Place 4 and 5, respectively, along with the too-large Place 3 turnout.

To remedy the problem, Krause said a request for a recount will be filed with a state district judge next week after the results reported on election night are canvassed.

Krause said he'd prefer not to rely on ballot summaries generated by the iVotronics machines.

“My problem with that is, if that tape tells us the same results as either from Tuesday or Wednesday, and we're questioning those results, does it confirm something?” he said.

“I'm trying to find out if we can go in and print an image of every single ballot that was cast, and count them by hand. That's pretty time-consuming, but this election is important enough to get it right,” Krause said.

ES&S officials said they were investigating the Comal problems but had no ready explanation.

Comal County Elections Administrator Julie Kassab said later Friday that the machines are capable of yielding individual ballots for a manual recount. A court order will be required to conduct it, she said.

The situation highlights a drawback of the so-called direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting machines: the absence of a paper trail that allows voters to verify their ballot preferences and serve as a backup to the digital results.

“There are audit logs on these machines that can provide useful information, but it won't tell you the voter's intent,” said Pamela Smith, president of Verified Voting, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group. “What we'd like to see is a voting system that provides a hard copy record to every voter at the time of the vote.”

While the use of DREs is growing, she said the country's most widely used style — which she prefers — involves a paper ballot that's filled out by the voter and then scanned and retained.

“In the event that equipment breaks down on election day, voters can still vote and the ballots can be tabulated later,” Smith said. “If the DRE breaks down, you don't have a way to vote.”

Voting is strictly electronic in Bexar County, which has 2,800 iVotronic machines, and it has worked well so far, Elections Administrator Jacque Callanen said.

“Our election officials love it, and the voters have embraced our touch-screen voting,” Callanen said. “We haven't had any problems like those reported in Comal County.”

Officials with the affected entities are on board with Comal County's strategy, Krause said. He said he has received criticisms of Kassab, who was hired in June to the newly created post of elections administrator, but said the priority was to “get everything straightened out where everyone is confident with the election results.”